Episode Summary
Executive Summary: Rob Wiblin interviews Will MacAskill about his book What We Owe the Future, focusing on long-termism, value contingency, and the importance of rigorous fact-checking. They also discuss EA’s evolving culture: ambition, scalable projects, moral seriousness, mental health, and how a flood of new funding changes grantmaking, risk-taking, and standards.
Main Topics: What We Owe the Future and the long-termist case: Will previews the book’s main contributions: accessible population ethics, the value of the future, stagnation during a perilous period, and the role of values in shaping the far future. Value contingency vs convergence: The conversation emphasizes that moral values may not inevitably converge; who holds power during key junctures can strongly shape civilization’s trajectory. Fact-checking and nonfiction rigor: Will describes the unusually large team and time investment needed to verify claims, warning that many compelling historical or scientific claims don’t survive scrutiny. EA culture: ambition, scalable projects, and funding: They discuss how EA has shifted from tiny, marginal giving decisions to launching and scaling projects, with a push toward ambitious, high-upside work. Mental health, work-life balance, and sustainability: Will explains how therapy, habits, and self-compassion helped him recover from depression and avoid burnout despite intense responsibilities. Grantmaking, mission drift, and community standards: The discussion covers risks from easy money, motivated reasoning, mediocre projects persisting, and the need for selective funding and healthy criticism. Concrete examples: lead exposure, shrimp welfare, media, forecasting: Will highlights projects he sees as promising, including lead paint enforcement, shrimp welfare, forecasting, and media projects that can scale influence.
Key Arguments: Long-termism matters because the future could contain enormous value, but value outcomes are not guaranteed; who shapes values and institutions at key moments may matter as much as preventing extinction. Historical change is highly contingent: abolition of slavery, dietary norms, and even apparently arbitrary practices show that convergence on today’s values is not inevitable. Many nonfiction claims are unreliable unless heavily checked; rigorous verification is especially necessary in history and science because citation chains can be misleading or false. EA should increasingly think in terms of ambitious, scalable projects rather than only marginal cost-effectiveness, since some opportunities can absorb vastly more resources and still be high-impact. With large new funding, EA must guard against extravagance, motivated reasoning, and low-quality projects that survive only because money is available. Maintaining moral seriousness may require visible sacrifice, but it should be balanced against productivity and sustainability; over-frugality can also be counterproductive. Self-compassion and mental health practices are not indulgences; for high-responsibility work, they can improve long-run productivity and resilience. The community should reward honorable failure and shutting down weak projects, because in a high-ambition ecosystem many attempts should fail and resources should move to better uses.
Data Points: EA Global London attendance: 1,300 people - Described as the biggest Effective Altruism Global London conference so far. Book-writing time investment: about 2 years - Will says he focused almost entirely on the book from March 2020 to December of the prior year. Fact-checking effort: almost 2 years - Will estimates nearly two years of the book’s total work went into fact-checking. Total work on the book: over a decade's worth of time - Will estimates the book consumed more than ten person-years of effort across contributors. Mentions of the future fund applications: 1,800 applications - The Future Fund open call generated a very large application pool. Response time target: 14 days - The fund aimed to reply to applicants within 14 days, and reportedly hit that for about 90% of cases. Response time coverage: 90% - Most applicants got a reply within the promised time window. FTX/SBF wealth estimate: $24 billion - Rob cites Forbes’ estimate of Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth. Gary Wang net worth estimate: $6 billion - Rob cites Gary Wang’s public net worth estimate. Gates Foundation annual grants: about $6 billion a year - Correction at the end of the episode notes the current figure is closer to $6B, not $3.5B. Gates Foundation wealth growth: doubled his wealth - Will notes Bill Gates’ wealth roughly doubled even while donating heavily. Lead paint project staffing: 3 employees, all directors - Will describes the Lead Exposure Elimination Project as extremely lean. Potato productivity claim: 3 times as many calories per acre - Will cites a study suggesting potatoes can yield far more calories per acre than wheat. Jainism origin correction: 500 to 800 BC - Rob corrects his earlier mistaken estimate of 4000 BC. Historical abolition timing claim: decades, centuries, or maybe even just would not have happened - Will relays historian Anton Howes’ view on how contingent slavery abolition may have been. Workplace example: 12 people - Will recalls the first CEA office basement cramped with about a dozen people.
Pivotal Quotes: "there's this fundamental arbitrariness" — Will MacAskill: On cultural norms like Happy Birthday and neckties, used to illustrate contingency. "It's a marathon, not a splint" — Will MacAskill: His repeated mantra for sustainable work and avoiding burnout. "if you want to do as much good an expectation as possible, ideally, you should be aiming for those like you know, best case outcomes" — Will MacAskill: On why EA should value ambitious, high-upside career and funding strategies.
Implications: The episode argues for a more ambitious, but also more disciplined EA: aim for scalable impact, preserve rigor and honesty, protect mental health, and be willing to shut down weak ideas so resources flow to the most promising ones.